What Are the Benefits of SMS Marketing? 12 Advantages to Influence Your Customers

First thing’s first: Why am I bothering to outline the benefits of SMS marketing at all?

Well, the average consumer receives anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day. It sounds pretty unbelievable, but the reality is we’re completely saturated in marketing.

As I’ll touch on shortly, SMS is the top way to break through the noise thanks to sky-high open and response rates.

But SMS is so much more than just a fast way to reach your customers. It’s a sophisticated communication channel rooted in trust, reciprocity, and results.

In short, SMS marketing is extremely effective.

Here are just a few reasons why your organization could benefit from the wide range of advantages SMS marketing has to offer.

From the widely known to the “I never even thought about that”, here are the 12 biggest advantages to SMS marketing.

Benefits of SMS marketing:

1. SMS open rates are as high as 98%.
2. SMS conversion rates are as high as 45%.
3. 70% of consumers subscribe to SMS marketing messages from businesses.
4. SMS opt-ins are growing 12% year over year.
5. SMS messages are typically delivered within five seconds.
6. 98% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent.
7. Send as many as 500 text messages for just $29.
8. Communicate to groups without reply all and provide 1-on-1 sales and support.
9. Subscribers opt in so you have access to an engaged audience.
10. Measuring success is easy with SMS marketing tools like SimpleTexting.
11. SMS marketing easily complements other existing marketing efforts like promotions.
12. Unlike email marketing, SMS marketing requires no coding or design experience.

Recommended Reading: What Are the Pros and Cons of SMS Marketing?

We don’t keep it a secret that SMS continually tops email when it comes to open rates. Research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98% compared to just 21.5% for emails. 

That kind of visibility is untouchable when it comes to digital marketing. Not to mention how your text messages show up next to updates from friends and family, which lends them an extra layer of familiarity.

Not only are your texts statistically more likely than your emails to be opened, SMS campaigns are also more likely to produce results. Studies show that the conversion rates of SMS campaigns can be as high as 45%.

Our customer, Whisker Seeker, routinely sees a 25% conversion rate on its SMS promotions. Another customer, Toroe Eyewear increased its e-commerce store’s conversion rate by 200% using text marketing!

As a business texting company, one of the most common questions we get is, “Do my customers actually want me to text them?”

Well, good news: As of 2022, 70% of consumers subscribe to SMS marketing messages from businesses, which represents a 12% growth in opt-in rates year over year.

So, yes, your customers are tuned in and open to getting your texts. All you have to do is send them.

Text messages cost only pennies to send, and plans can be scaled up or down at anytime to fit your needs.

Each platform has its own rates, but with SimpleTexting, you can send 500 SMS messages for $29. As we already mentioned, the average conversion rate of texts ranges from 25 to 45%.  

If your business profits $10 per order and you send a text blast to 500 contacts, you’ll generate $1,250 in revenue with a 25% conversion rate. That’s a 4,210% ROI!

Unlike other mobile messaging platforms, text marketing is the only way to both chat individually with customers and send group messages without reply all.

This makes it a versatile platform that can be used for sales, customer service/support, and internal communications all in one.

Thanks to a little something known as compliance, all of your contacts must give you express written consent to receive messages. On the upside, this means that your text audience is filled with people who actively want to engage with your brand.

You can categorize, personalize, and segment your most engaged supporters and serve them content with a much higher chance of results.

Text marketing makes it easy to see the fruits of your labor. With analytics showing you click-through rates (CTR), you can watch your campaign play out in real-time.

Thanks to features like link shortening and tracking, it’s also easy to place a link with a custom UTM right in your text so you can directly measure the outcome of your campaign without any room for ambiguity!

A single SMS message or auto-reply is typically delivered within 5 seconds of being sent. How’s that for speed? Not to mention, 98% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent.

This makes texting the perfect medium for something like a time-sensitive deal or flash sale.

SMS marketing makes the perfect complement to your existing marketing tools or tactics—whether you want to combine SMS and social media or boost the open rates on your emails by sending a text reminder. 

Through native integrations or third-party tools like Zapier, you can automate your way through anything by pairing it with texting.

For example:

• Send abandoned cart texts from your e-commerce platform
• Sync calendars with text reminders
• Add new email contacts directly from text message submissions

Another huge benefit of SMS marketing is that text messages don’t require design or development work. With emails, you need to build templates and make sure they work on different email clients.

That can take a lot of time.

With texts, it’s as easy as sending your mom a quick update.

Did you know that texts that include pictures generate a higher CTR? With text marketing, it’s a common myth that your messages are limited to just 160 characters of pure text. 

Thanks to MMS, you can include all kinds of rich media such as photos, videos, GIFs, and audio files. You can even type up to 1,600 characters of text!

A recent study found that as many as 85% of emails wind up in the spam folder. This is precisely why there are regulations around text marketing. It’s a trusted inbox, and no one wants to see it fall to the same fate as email!

This is also a benefit for brands that prioritize express written consent. You don’t have to fear your messages being lost in the void once they’re sent. In other words, there is no spam folder for SMS.

If any of these sound appealing to you, I have great news. You can experience all these benefits of SMS marketing for free, for 14 days.

Simply start your SimpleTexting trial and see for yourself what all the excitement is about!

This piece was originally published July 24, 2020. It was refreshed and repurposed May 30, 2023. Meghan Tocci contributed to this piece.